Woman swims 500 yards to toast 100th birthday

Published 11:56 pm, Friday, September 20, 2013

MILFORD -- Most people likely wouldn't want to attempt a quarter-mile swim. Then again, Margaret K. Wachs isn't most people.

On Friday, to celebrate her 100th birthday, Wachs swam 10 laps in the Woodruff Family YMCA pool. That's 500 yards -- the equivalent of five football fields, and more than a quarter mile.

"I feel pretty good," Wachs said just before she eased herself into the pool at the Orange Avenue facility. "I never was a top swimmer, but as a child I used to swim in the lakes of Vermont where I grew up -- on a farm in North Bedford."

"It was a one-room schoolhouse; all eight grades in one room," she said. "I don't know if those kids learned a thing."

She married Miller Wachs, a graduate of Dartmouth and MIT, who was on Igor Sikorsky's first team of helicopter engineers. She still lives in the family home on Wilcoxson Avenue in Stratford, where she's been since 1951. Her husband died 2½ years ago.

The couple had five daughters -- and all were on hand Friday to witness their mother's feat.

This latest swim was her third pool fundraiser for the Stratford United Methodist Church. The first one raised about $3,000. The second, when Wachs turned 99, raised about $4,000. This one is expected to raise more than $6,000.

"The money is still coming in," said Bonnie Huey, a daughter who lives in Orange. The Wachs family has been a member of the church since the 1940s.

She visited China before Richard Nixon "opened" the nation in 1972. On her second visit there, she broke her leg on the Great Wall and was taken to a hospital in the back of a Red Army troop transport truck. Wachs also visited the former Soviet Union and 27 other nations.

That included in Africa.

Wachs was born when Woodrow Wilson was president. It was the same year Ebbets Field opened, Ford's auto assembly line began rolling, the zipper was patented and "The Rite of Spring" premiered in Paris.

As with most people who celebrates a 100th birthday, Wachs has a few health challenges. She's nearly blind from glaucoma and she's had foot problems for decades.

But in the water, those shortcomings seem to dissolve, according to Matt Loprino, the aquatics director at the Woodruff YMCA.

"Swimming is a wonderful activity for her," he said. "There's no stress on her joints because they're weightless in the water."

Loprino said her feats in the pool have given much younger people at the YMCA -- even teenagers -- the impetus to swim longer lengths.

"She can't go far in her walker," said daughter Greta Jacobsen. "But she's a political junkie, and she's really mad that the Republicans want to defeat Obamacare."

Wachs took up swimming in earnest just four years ago. When she was 70, she joined a senior bowling league and averaged 149 a game. In her 80s, curious about computers, she took a class on the subject and built her own computer.

When Wachs first starting swimming in 2009, it took her 15 trips to the pool before she built up enough stamina to swim from one side to the other.

On Friday, Wachs swam that and much more with four generations in the pool. Joining her were Matto, granddaughter Amy Weintraub, of the Bronx, N.Y., and Wachs' great-granddaughter, Natalie Weintraub, 6.

For the record, Wachs completed her swim in 55 minutes, 16 seconds, although 500 yards is an odd distance in competitive swimming because top-level meets use the metric system.

But high school meets in the United States still use the yardstick. The owner of the 500-yard freestyle record is Nick Arakelian of Stevenson High School in Livonia, Mich. He set the record in 4 minutes, 27.75 seconds on March 9.

One might wonder whether Arakelian will attempt to swim 500 yards when he turns 100.